As the outstanding connoisseur of Persian art who once owned and published this picture, the late Stuart Cary Welch considered it the crowning achievement of Shaykh-Zāda, a disciple of the great Timurid and early Safavid master Bihzād (ca. 1465–1535 AD). A resident of Herāt, Shaykh-Zāda continued to work faithfully in Bihzād’s manner some years after Bihzād himself had, in effect, retired from active painting. Bihzād, in 1526–7, was officially still grand-master of the Safavid realm’s craftsmen of the book (ever since his appointment to this prestigious post by Shāh Ismā‘īl in 1522 AD), but the jeweller’s precision demanded by such miniature labour strained the eyesight and shortened the practical working life of these meticulously painstaking artists of the sixteenth century. Shaykh-Zāda perpetuated Bihzād’s classical Herātī style with the vivid, gemlike tints of his little figures’ robes that leap to the eye, and almost dance against the flat-patterned but intricate geometry of the mosque’s deep blue arch and carpeting – geometry brought to life through sheer vigorous colour.
Only scale, as often remarked, distinguishes the painter’s miniature gateway from its model, one of the soaring tiled arches of Herāt’s Friday Mosque. Classical Persian painting’s bold juxtapositions of primary, unshadowed, highly costly hues – derived from cinnabar (red), orpiment (yellow), malachite (green) and powdered lapis lazuli rinsed in linseed oil (ultramarine) – within a bold geometric framework that powerfully ignores foreshortening provoked the admiration of Matisse.
Closer inspection reveals Shaykh-Zāda’s expressively drawn faces, reflections again of Bihzād’s probing lessons in psychological rendition, and also four inscriptions charged with symbolic meaning. The upper left-hand corner frames the verses of the ghazal which this painting specifically ‘illustrates’ or rather visually comments upon. But the ‘tilework’ inscription over the main arch, and a second inscription running across the lintel above the window to the left, quote from two other of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals: indications that the painter was deeply versed in all Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry and wished to address several themes at once, themes recurrent throughout the Dīvān and regarded as important in sixteenth-century tradition.
The allegorical key unlocking the intent of many fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Persian and then Indo-Islamic manuscript illuminations lies in such deliberate resort, by the painters, to direct visual allusions to the matter of another poem, or, indeed, to outright verbal quotations from another poem, often discreetly inserted as calligraphic bands within the architectural ‘tilework’ (as is the case here), in order to throw further spiritual light upon the poem or episode ostensibly illustrated.
Carefully deciphered Persian and Indian manuscript illuminations of this period thus offer us pointed commentaries – not only visually through drawing and paint, but even in a strictly literary sense with further added verses – of the major poets of the Iranian canon. These artistic clues should prove no less precious to us than the written glosses of the age’s most learned scribes. Ḥāfiẓ’s deeper meanings, as understood by painters far more steeped than ourselves in their own cultural tradition, appear further revealed in the wrinkled brows and quizzical glances of Shaykh-Zāda’s tiny but moving human characters.
Martin Dickson identified the painting’s inscription, in his personal communication to S. C. Welch’s cited work on Safavid painting,4 where the upper left-hand corner contains a couplet from Ḥāfiẓ which reads:
Vā‘iẓān k-īn jalva dar miḥrāb u minbar mīkunand,
Chūn bi khalvat mīravand, ān kār-i dīgar mīkunand!
Preachers who preen in prayer-niche and pulpit,
When in private, quite another matter do they practise – than they preach!5
The main arch’s inscription, featuring another verse from a different ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ, reads:
Burū bi kār-i khwud, ay vā‘iẓ, īn chi faryādast?
Ma-rā futād dil az rāh. Turā, chi uftādast?
Go about your business, preacher! What is this outcry for?
My heart, for me, fell off the path. So what fell off, for you?6
The window lintel’s inscription is capped with another of Ḥāfiẓ’s lines, reading:
Ravāq-i manẓar-i chashm-i man, āshiyāna-yi tust!
[Karam numāy u furūd ā, ki khāna, khāna-yi tust!]
The arch of my eye’s orbit is your very nest!
[Show mercy and come down! For this eye’s house – is yours!]7
And over the closed door, within the mosque’s arch, runs a further inscription, not exactly from the ghazals, but an invocation commonly seen in Bihzād’s and other Timurid master-painters’ architectural settings:
Yā Mufattiḥ al-Abwāb!
Oh Opener of Gates!
The overt theme of Shaykh-Zāda’s painting is the contrast so often stressed by Ḥāfiẓ himself – as the artist implies by quoting from the second ghazal over the arch – between the superficial or hypocritical preacher, perched upon his pulpit and draped in correct ritual observance, and the honest Sufi ecstatic with true inner spiritual love.
But Shaykh-Zāda plays a further visual game with his citation from a third ghazal, fraught with even profounder meaning. A cluster of the painter’s astonished spectators (one bites his finger in awe), those framed by the mosque’s arched window on the left, are shown here to behold a spiritual mystery disclosed by the artist through the very shape of the arched window, itself reflected by the quoted hemistich immediately above: clearly alluding to the ravāq-i manẓar-i chashm-i man, literally ‘the arch of the window of the eye of me’; that is, to the eye’s orbit, and more sharply, to just what that eye sees and to what vision lodges within that same eye’s orbit: Thou, the Tajallī or Divine Manifestation, here the Divine made visible through the heart and mind and countenance of the ecstatic Sufi writhing in union with the Divine upon the carpeted floor.
The mosque’s faithful understand this mystery, and turn their eyes away from the preacher, towards the ecstatic devotee. In the composition’s centre, the kneeling prince, most probably Shāh Ṭahmāsb himself, with his turban wrapped around the typical towering pointed skullcap or tāj-i Ḥaydarī (‘‘Alī’s crown’) favoured by the early Safavids, bends his glance in the correct direction. Most members of the congregation with similar Shi‘ite turbans cup their hands in prayer, respectfully hide them in the long sleeves of their caftans, or wipe tears with a kerchief or shawl, moved to the depths of their being by the mystical experience. Those who cannot contemplate the Mystery directly turn to question their companions, who gesticulate in explanation. One bearded and yellow-coated character in the lower left who does thus look away, gripping his wand of office, is almost certainly the ‘guardian’ or raqīb, a stock figure in classical Persian poems and paintings alike (as in another Ḥāfiẓ ghazal, where the accepted soul describes itself as able to ‘pass beyond the warden’s force in every case’ – tavān guzasht zi jūr-i raqīb dar hama hāl),8 whose charge is to prevent those unworthy from approaching royalty or the Beloved or, allegorically, the Divine Presence, despite, here, a youth’s explanatory gestures. Then again, this same guardsman, who himself does not merit to look directly upon the Divine Mystery, contemplates the refraction of this Divine Mystery upon the youth’s handsome countenance: for the youth further wears an archer’s ring upon his thumb, a tiny detail which implies that this youth’s glance can pierce like an arrow straight through the guardian’s heart. As the painter states over the main arch, God alone chooses unto whom He shall open the Mystery’s Doors.
The white-bearded painter himself, in astrakhan cap, kneels with folded hands at the bottom of the picture in a posture of reverent humility, just over his diminutive signature scrawled upon a floor-tile as if for the faithful to step on: amala Shaykh-Zāda (Shaykh-Zāda wrought [this]). The painter listens intently as a learned master – his own teacher Bihzād?, or Ḥāfiẓ himself? – expounds to him the meaning of the scene. Shortly after completing this painting, Shaykh-Zāda quit Safavid ser
vice, perhaps not feeling properly appreciated, as S.C. Welch suggests,9 to take up residence at the Sunnī Uzbek court of Bukhārā.
The illustration of the romantic imagery of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry in Incident in a Mosque provides an excellent introduction to the Sufi symbolism underlying another equally famous miniature painting that also belongs to the same manuscript of the Dīvān, copied for the Safavid prince Sām Mīrzā. To this illustration of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān, featured on the back cover of this volume, art historians generally give the title of ‘Allegory of Otherworldly Drunkenness’ or ‘Heavenly and Earthly Drunkenness’. It was painted by Sulṭān-Muḥammad, being a page from the same manuscript from 1526 or 1527 AD.10 Like Shaykh-Zāda, but an even more powerful and visionary artist, the master from Tabrīz, Sulṭān-Muḥammad (who should now recognizably rank in the public eye with his exact contemporaries Bosch, Dürer, Leonardo and Giorgione in the West, Cheou Ch’en and Shūkei Sesson in the East, as one of the very greatest painters of the early sixteenth-century world) intends to evoke the mood of the entire Dīvān, not one particular episode.
Sulṭān-Muḥammad’s chosen scene is a samā‘, the spiritual ‘audition’ of the dervishes with their music and dance, waving the long sleeves of their caftans as they spiral in ‘drunken’ state. More extant fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings of the samā‘ grace the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ than the works of any other Persian poet, including even manuscripts of Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī himself (which are rarely illustrated). Such paintings underscore how much traditional readers in the Iranian and Indo-Muslim worlds perceived Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān to be a pre-eminent allegory of Sufi love and mystical frenzy. Sulṭān-Muḥammad, mindful of the poet’s playfully paradoxical praise throughout the Dīvān of the rind or spiritual ‘rogue’, that is, the dervish who, out of humility, deliberately seeks to shock and court the ‘blame’ (malāmat) of the conventionally pious through apparently outrageous behaviour, here portrays every type of mystic: from laymen enthusiastically throwing themselves into the dance, to three wildly caricatured, clownlike qalandar dervishes with shaven eyebrows, moustaches and beards, to the lower left.
Under powerful magnification, the vivid details of this prodigious painting retain all their sharpness and loom into bold relief, especially under raking light – like the kind that might have been cast by a flickering candle held by the prince who owned this volume and gazed on its particulars with vision heightened by wine laced with cannabis (Shāh Ṭahmāsb, as we know, was most partial to the ‘ruby’ and ‘emerald’ until repentance in middle age): from the tiny pearly rows of teeth of the singer with the tambourine, to the individually painted strands of every beard and the thickly applied whipped-cream folds of the turbans, the raised swirls upon the clay wine jars (almost invisible to the naked eye, but amazingly clear under a glass), the encrusted gems of the angels’ crowns, and the almost undetectable gold spots sprinkled upon the walls to make the entire illumination glow. To the lower right, a tipsy prince with turban-egret (Prince Sām Mīrzā?) extends his foot to be kissed by another participant in a drunken stupor; in fact, Sulṭān-Muḥammad slyly amuses himself by drawing three legs to this strange prince: one extended, the two others folded beneath him; the artist signed this picture in minute characters within the ‘tilework’ over the lintel of the palace’s door: ‘the work of Sulṭān Muḥammad’ (‘amala Sulṭān-Muḥammad).
This illumination accompanies another of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals, which it directly faces in the original manuscript. One of this ghazal’s verses (though not included in Khānlarī’s critical edition) appears encapsulated above the picture:
Girifta sāghar-i ‘ishrat firishta-yi Raḥmat,
Zi jur‘a bar rukh-i ḥūr u parī gulāb zada.
Mercy’s angel gripped communion’s cup
And poured a draft that pinked a huri’s
And a fairy’s cheek.11
But this painting could just as easily have ‘illustrated’, say, ghazal number 192:
Yār-i mā chūn gīrad āghāz-i samā‘,
Qudsiyān bar ‘arsh dast-afshān kunand.
When our Beloved takes it to start on the Samā‘,
The very angels would shake forth their sleeves
Unto the Throne!12
Ḥāfiẓ himself, as the Lisān al-ghayb or ‘Tongue of the Unseen World’, and with the bulging eyes of a visionary, reads in the magic palace’s window from his own Dīvān. The poet reclines beneath the rooftop of the angels in their heavenly sphere, but is yet himself raised high above most human dwellers in this lower world.
The poet, as privileged intermediary, interprets the mysteries of the upper world, which only privileged seers like himself may behold, and then relays them through his poetry to the receptive souls of the faithful below. Wine, one of Sufism’s favoured (and ultimately Zoroastrian-derived) metaphors for divine light (red at dawn, golden at noon) and for the illuminating and creative divine wisdom or Intellect, descends from its celestial heights, where it is first only quaffed by angels (their cheeks flushed by its warmth), down into this world’s receiving vessels: through clay jars formed of this earth from which we ourselves are moulded, then through decanters of mystical instruction poured by this ‘tavern’s’ spiritual teachers, and finally to the cups that symbolize our hearts. As the wine inflames us, its warmth dissolves the veils of our earthly illusions and senses and allows our mystical intuition to transcend our arrogant everyday rationalizations, so that, as alert readers of Ḥāfiẓ’s lessons and visions, we may clearly behold the heavenly mysteries in turn, and dance for joy. The mystical ecstasy imparted by Ḥāfiẓ’s verses is a ‘drunkenness’ that is a higher form of perception.
By a deliberate trick of paint, Sulṭān-Muḥammad causes a scarlet peony, part of the ‘tilework’ décor within the alcove wherein the poet reads, to burst flamelike directly atop (or actually from) the poet’s own decanter, whence the poet pours unto us his verses: a metaphor for the flaming wine of divine inspiration further relayed below through the clay jar, wherein a handsome page or ‘young Magus’ dips a ladle to fill our flagons and so quench our spiritual thirst. He is the sāqī or cupbearer of the holy brew, and himself offers his comely countenance unto our neo-Platonic contemplation of the mirrored beautiful ideas in his soul as a shāhid or ‘witness’ to them. Another line in the poem ‘illustrated’ tells (upon the painting’s facing leaf) how the rays of the dawning wine-flame not only blank out the moon, but, by mirrored reddening upon the flushed countenances of the ‘young Magi’, overwhelm the very light of the sun:
Shu‘ā‘-i jām u qadaḥ, nūr-i māh pūshīda!
‘Idhār-i mugh-bachigān, rāh-i āfitāb zada!
Rays from the cup and goblet overcloaked the moon’s own light!
The Magi children’s reddened cheeks waylaid the very sun!13
The painter captures the difficult quintuple imagery, solar, winelike, kisslike, archangelic, hence ‘intellectual’ (in the medieval ‘dawnlike’ or ‘illuminating’ sense of successive emanating archangelic Intellects from the footstep or threshold of God’s Throne, that shine down and so ‘kiss’ with their quickening light the successive planes of created being), of another of the text’s extremely demanding verses:
Khirad kih mulham-i Ghayb ast, bahr-i kasb-i sharaf
Zi bām-i ‘arsh, sadash būsa bar janāb zada.
Intellect, the Unseen World’s inspirer,
to catch its every nobleness
on high
From the rooftop of the Throne,
Bestowed a hundred kisses
On its edge.14
The picture’s pavilion is, indeed, the famous ‘Tavern of the Magi’, or rather, here, the ‘Enclosure’ or ‘Palace of the Magi’, Sarāy-i Mughān – as the poem’s first line states, but a pavilion that is also planted like a ‘tent’ (khayma) in the midst of the ‘ruinous’ (kharāb) domain of this lower illusory world, with the expected deliberate wordplay on the Persianized Arabic term for ‘ruin
s’ (kharābāt) that came to mean ‘tavern’ in Persian usage, one of the most recurrent of all the Dīvān’s images and puns. Here the ‘Chief Magus’ or Sufi master – with his venerable snowy beard, seated towards the lower right, pours spiritual wine from true wisdom’s decanter, into the cup from which avidly drinks a disciple:
Dar-i Sarāy-i Mughān rufta būd u āb zada,
Nishasta Pīr u ṣalā’ī bi shaykh u shāb zada.
The door to the Magi’s Palace was swept and watered clean
And there sat the Elder Master, pouring out his Fire
To old and young alike.15
Sulṭān-Muḥammad’s careful composition, which the spirited movement of his mordantly observed individual characters stirs to life, shows the Divine Light’s descent (nuzūl) from the higher planes of Being to the lower: in the careful hierarchy of Islamicized neo-Platonic thought and imagery upon which Ḥāfiẓ so much plays in verse. It is the descent of the ‘wine’-like Light, lowered from on high like a decanter at the end of a tār or ‘string’ (or ‘rope’, on the left), a metaphor for the all-connecting and all-pervading emanation of the divine creative clarity, from its most rarefied and immaterial heavenly configurations, to its densest and most visible embodiments on earth.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 38